A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Saturday, May 24, 2025

The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

Adrien Brody in The Brutalist

Cast: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Isaac De Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola, Ariane Labed, Michael Epp, Emma Laird, Jonathan Hyde. Screenplay: Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold. Cinematography: Lol Crawley. Production design: Judy Becker. Film editing: Dávid Jancsó. Music: Daniel Blumberg. 

Reading some of the online comments about Brady Corbet's The Brutalist, I was surprised to learn that some people thought László Tóth was a real person. Which made me realize that I much prefer a faux biopic like The Brutalist to the ones like Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023) that purport to be about a real person. Tóth may be based on architects like Gropius, Breuer, and Mies van der Rohe, but he's wholly the creation of Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold, and we don't need to waste time fussing over what's fact and what's fiction. To be sure, with its curlicues of plot and eruptions of emotion, The Brutalist feels more Baroque than Bauhaus, the spare and linear architectural style it celebrates in the film's epilogue. It's also overlong and sometimes substitutes caricature for characterization, as in the role of Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who utters lines more florid than any real American captain of industry ever mustered. Still, Adrien Brody's performance brings Tóth to life and richly deserved the Oscar it received.   

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